Mona GableWriter and Journalist focusing on politics and parenting
Posted: January 18, 2010 07:22 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index
Doctors Without Borders in Haiti: Why Couldn't They Land?

Bill Clinton is on the ground in Haiti with Chelsea touring the rubble. I'm elated the former president was able to get permission from the Defense Department to fly in. It's no small feat, I'm telling you. Because apparently not everyone can.

Take Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the highly respected international medical humanitarian organization. You know, the one Sandra Bullock gave $1 million this week before she won the Golden Globe? They've been in Haiti for years. They have hundreds of medical staff in place, and are working in five hospitals in Port-au-Prince. They know the country. They're experts in delivering medical aid. These are the people you want on the ground after a killer earthquake? Am I right?

Then why was an MSF cargo plane carrying, among other badly needed supplies, an inflatable surgical hospital, not allowed to land in Port-au-Prince on Saturday and re-routed to the Dominican Republic? Despite assurances from the United Nations and the Defense Department that its planes would be allowed in?

If this is an air traffic control problem, they need to fix it now. Maybe Bill could help?

The inflatable hospital included two operating theaters, an intensive care unit, 100 beds, an emergency room and equipment for sterilizing material. The supplies had to be sent by truck, so the hospital didn't arrive in Haiti until a day later.

To be fair, a plane carrying supplies for the other half of the field hospital did arrive in Port-au-Prince on Sunday. But for a while even that looked sketchy. And as Isabelle Jeanson, an MSF Emergency Communications Officer wrote in an email from Haiti on Sunday: "MSF is still concerned that delivery of vital supplies is being delayed."

As the crisis in Haiti drags on survivors are dying. Even if they're rescued, they're slowly and painfully dying from their wounds because they can't get into surgery quickly enough. And they can't get into surgery because the hospitals have collapsed and the makeshift ones aren't equipped to do surgery. That is, except for the Israelis. They had a modern field hospital up and running in seconds. But they can't treat 2 million people.

The MSF plane that was dispatched to the Dominican Republic was carrying medical supplies for Choscal hospital in Cite Soleil, which had barely a 24-hour supply left for the 500 patients waiting to have surgery. Even under horrific conditions, MSF teams performed more than 90 operations in the day after their operating theatre was functional.

Like other aid groups in Haiti, Doctors Without Borders is hurting too. Some of their Haitian staff members died. Some they haven't been able to reach.

And then there is the frustration of trying to help. Of not having the right equipment. The heartache of watching people die when you know you could have saved them.

As Jeanson wrote in her email on Sunday: "Patients who were not critical only three days ago are now in critical phases. This means that people will die from preventable infections. It's horrible. It's really so terrible that people are begging for help and we can't help them all to save their lives!"

Blacks are not viewed as worthy of having life, so this is the white worlds way of making sure we suffer and die slowly. We must do like Elijah Muhammed said and create our own. Until then, we will always live and suffer thru these types of events with very little care or concern from others.

Blacks are not viewed as worthy of having life, so this is the white worlds way of making sure we suffer and die slowly. We must do like Elijah Muhammed said and create our own. Until then, we will always live and suffer thru these types of events with very little care or concern from others.

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At this point in our history after the pleas from Marcus garvey, after the Pleas fromThe Honorable Elijah Muhammed, after the pleas from Chancellor Williams,
after the ovious continuation and escalation of racism,

we should and need to especially after Katrina and those horrors and a declining economy that will certainly leave us last,

form a Black cross, first nationaly, then in the Carribean then with Africa.

And it would be no great expense.
From a poeple who spend 800 billion per year regardless of the economic situation, just the amount of money we spend on snacky cakes, fried chicken wings, buffalo wings, snacky chips, soda pop, energy drinks and lottery scratch offs, out of 36 million poeple, would generate the kind of institution we need for our safety

Airport Port o Prince
There was a story out earlier, when everything first started and the US got there and they were running things from a laptop and a walkie talkie but most people either blew it off, or didn't let it bother them at the time.( was CNN video)

I remember the article quite well. Seems some french doctors were brought in the second day after the quake on a french passenger plane. They unloaded their doctors and cargo as well as some aid, and the pilot just SAT on the runway in an empty plane. The US controllers asked them to move the plane to another area or to take off as they had planes "stacked up" waiting to land.
At that point the french airliner's pilot told them NO, that his president had told him NOT to leave Haiti until he filled up the plane with French citizens
who wished to return to France. That's the "tussle" that the frenchman was
talking about in the above linked story that he had with American military controllers. They later found out that the french plane that wouldn't "leave" to make room for others to land stayed on the ground for close to 7 hours
waiting for a reload of french citizens, BUT in that 7 hours 9 PLANES were denied permission to land or diverted to DR ( 1 of which were the French Doctors supply plane ) BECAUSE the runway was tied up by a French aircraft that refused to leave. So while all this was going on NO ONE was getting into the airport to bring ANYTHING.

I don't think the US purposely denied the doctor's plane ( the most recent) to land with their supplies. It was explained by US military officers on the ground that Haiti's government was providing manifests of what planes were carrying what and what priority they had , and no one from Haiti Or the Doctors group mentioned to the manifest people what was ON their plane.

The US clearly stated had they known it was medicine it would have been given priority to land. So someone dropped the ball on this. Even though the doctor's flight had been "pre-cleared" ( using their words) to land, someone neglected to tell the Haitians in charge of manifesting the flights what was on the plane.